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Friday, March 30, 2007

More on the Scotty uniform shirt...

Here are two thoughts on the "James Doohan" shirt that is ending today, from two of my prop collecting budddies.

"As you have noted, the colors of the patch and shoulder straps and the rank are wrong for Scotty. My guess is that they took a shirt that already existed but not needed for Scotty and used it for another cast member to avoid having to create it anew. It might have seen the screen but not on Doohan.

One thing that I noticed is that the material for the shoulder straps has often faded over the years for some of the divisional colors. Check the pictures in your Christie's catalog for the security (gray) and medical (green) straps. They are almost tan now. But other colors such as red and orange have fared well.

"Another case of a costume made for the movie and not used. We have seen many of these so far, (Rand last week, McCoy in the upcoming Profiles auction). I’m sure this one is a relisting from the week 2 or 3."

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I'll offer another theory - if you look on page 104 of Grace Lee Whitney's biography "The Longest Trek", you will see a picture of one of James Doohan's sons wearing a shirt that looks exactly like the one being auctioned in a candid photo taken during the Rec Deck scene from STTMP. Doohan and Whitney are posed with their respective sons, all three of whom are extras in uniform in that scene.

Yes, this so-called "Scotty" was a relisted lot. On January 5 it went up to $1,625 without reaching its reserve. $3,450 is obviously a big improvement for IAW, but people were surely hesitant to bid when they saw the reserve present knowing it would likely be relisted anyway.

There were about 19 items this past week that were relists, and thankfully IAW has nearly eliminated the practice of setting reserves. It's understandable on a real hero piece every once in a while, but what they were doing earlier was stupid.Just a cursory glance at the items other than the "Scotty" is that IAW might have made only a little more the second time around. When you factor eBay's relisting cost, other overhead like salary spent on the time to reprocess these lots, and, of course, the realization that bidders would in all likelihood have gone higher if the lots had not been marked with reserves, the impetus for IAW's (welcome) change in philosophy is clear.

The rubber ENT SF carbine (on its second listing) was the only item not to reach reserve this past week, and they immediately put it back in this week's auction. It looks like it will beat the high from last week but probably not what the reserve was originally.